Much earlier, Zaffaroni was part of a team of scientists who helped launch the birth control company Syntex.

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Robert Baile, 52, spent 20 years as a research chemist for Syntex Pharmaceuticals (now Roche) and five home-brewing in his basement before buying into the business in 1996.

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His shares in Syntex, which prospered in the 1960s and 1970s, bankrolled a personal gallery which once included at least eight Picassos, half a dozen Giacomettis and three Degas.

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In the early 1980s at a company called Syntex (now part of Roche), he developed Cytovene to treat a viral infection of the eye that can blind AIDS patients and recipients of organ transplants.

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During an earlier job at Syntex, a Mexican pharmaceutical company that gave the world the Pill, he noticed that hormones do their job better in the body if they are released at regular intervals, not all in one go as drugs usually are.

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